As you get into Perl (or are coming from another language where you already have a OO grounding) and want to know how to implement OO behaviour in a Perlish way, you would do well to read DamianConway's book ObjectOrientedPerl. It is also well worth checking out the ManPages perlboot and perltoot. -- DarrenTarbard

If anyone here really does want to learn Perl, I would highly suggest a book by Ellie Quigley, based on a popular class she teaches, and called Perl by Example. You will want the third edition (ISBN 0-13-655689-2 ). -- JoshuaKerievsky

Really? Having read that one I found it to be atrocious. Perhaps not quite the worst I've seen, but fairly bad anyway (in fact, I'm yet to be impressed by any of that publisher's produce). -- IainTruskett?

Having had a look through a copy I just found in my office, I'm not impressed at all - it strikes me as being like trying to learn a language from a phrasebook. The approach of LearningPerl is much more logical. Anyway, Amazon says this one is now out of print, so I would definitely recommend against it. As a general point, Perl learners should consider joining their local Perl Mongers chapter - see http://www.pm.org/ for details. Having a friendly community around to talk to and ask questions of helped my learning process immensely. -- EarleMartin

I'm surprised to see any book Joshua favors disliked by other. I know he demands a great deal from anyone who claims to educate. Perhaps my unorthodox introduction has colored his expectation in this case. I taught Joshua perl in an afternoon over a chat connection. I did this by creating HelloWorld as a cgi scrip on my server and aliasing the source as a .txt file he could read. We then discussed things that the script might do. I would implement one of these in a line or two that he could read and try. In the few cases where the perl idioms were not obvious a line or two of chat was enough to make the program clear. -- WardCunningham

Hello folks,

This is my first day at Wiki. I am enjoying this here even though I admit that its a bit of CultureShock for me. This page will essentially deal with PerlProgramming and getting started with it. I am an amateur Perl programmer and I have had a number of people asking me on how to learn Perl, where to get started etc. Though I have given them directions, I am sure they haven't still started learning Perl yet. Frankly am not an expert (I learnt Perl over a weekend ) so I am not even sure if I was giving them right directions. Here I would like suggestions on where a person should start if he/she wants to learn Perl. We can discuss people from different backgrounds and how each one would get started. This is essential because a Java programmer thinks differently from a person who hasn't had any programming experience at all. I'll try to update this as frequently as possible. I already have a few ideas on this. -- PerlPathi?